Stephen King talks to Terry Gross about whether his writing changed after being hit by a car and getting addicted to Oxycontin, a habit which he has since kicked:

When I said that I wasn’t going to write or when I was going to retire, I was doing a lot of Oxycontin for pain and I was still having a lot of pain and it’s a depressive drug anyway and I was kind of a depressed human being because the therapy was painful. The recovery was slow and the whole thing just seemed like too much work, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll concentrate on getting better and I probably won’t want to write anymore,’ but as health and vitality came back, the urge to write came back. But here’s the thing: I’m on the inside and I’m not the best person to ask if my writing changed after that accident. I don’t really know the answer to that. I do know that … was close, that was really being close to stepping out. The accident and, a couple years later I had double pneumonia and that was close to stepping out of this life as well, and I think you have a couple of close brushes with death like that, it probably has [effect]. Somebody said, ‘The prospect of imminent death has a wonderful clarifying effect on the mind,’ and I don’t know if that’s true, but I do think it cause some changes, some evolution in the way a person works, but on a day-by-day basis I just still enjoy doing what I’m doing.

Image of Stephen King by PILGRIM via Wired

Tom Wolfe on his sociological approach to writing:

This attention to status … started when I was in graduate school and I was in a program called American Studies, which was a mixture of different disciplines but one [in which] you were forced to take sociology. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline that didn’t have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, ‘Hey, here’s the key. Here’s the key to understanding life and all its forms.’ And the great theorist or status theorist was a German named Max Weber. And from that time on, I said this obviously is the way to analyze people in all of their manifestations. I mean, my theory is that every moment — even when you’re by yourself in the bathroom, you are trying to live up to certain status requirements as if someone were watching … It’s only when your life is in danger that you drop all that.

Paul Thomas Anderson on how to break through writer’s block

The best way for me to start writing a story is to get two characters talking to each other. And if you got questions from one, you’re gonna have to get answers from the other, and you can start to find out who is coming out of you when you’re writing,

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren’t valued in women.

— Anna Quindlen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992, on today’s Fresh Air.

When things get too comfortable and things get too safe, I get the feeling like I’m smothering. It’s like somebody’s burying me in feathers.

— Writer Harry Crews died on Wednesday at the age of 76. He had a hard life and didn’t made it any easier for the characters in his novels.

Nothing about me wants to write. I reject it liked a transplanted organ. It’s a little bit of a dark window into my soul. I don’t mind writing scripts. I don’t mind writing something that I’m going to read because I think subconsciously, I’m confident that if I screw something up or something is inelegant or embarrassing or even wrong, because I’m writing myself, I can ad-lib the correction on-air of or fix it. When you’re writing for the eye, it’s unforgiving and I find it hard for me to commit to a sentence.

— Rachel Maddow on writing

It’s tough to associate creativity with mental illness because obviously if you’re very ill, it gets in the way. … But one of the theories now is that the terrible swings of the mental illness – of bipolar depression – you get these manic highs, these euphorias, where the ideas just pour out of you. And you need to write them down. That’s followed by this dismal low period when maybe you’re a better editor. Maybe it’s easier for you to focus and refine those epiphanies into a perfect form. … The thinking is maybe the correlation exists because the swings of mental illness echo the natural swings of the creative process.

— Jonah Lehrer, on the link between depression and creativity. [complete interview here]

Every book better be fully intimate, it better be all you have. I’m obviously not shy because I’m going to talk your ear off today but I’m private, which is different. But the idea for me to be truly intimate – for me to be naked and raw – the fiction allows me to do what I need to do emotionally. And with this book, certain stories were looking at things – it was a change for me to look at things that were right there.

— Nathan Englander on writing fiction.

I can hope, I can daydream, but certainly think that the chances of me being read 50 years from now or 100 years from now are probably not good. That cannot be your only end. You cannot write to be immortal because you will never know. It’s impossible. Just write as well as you can and don’t speculate about whether you will be Chaucer or Shakespeare.

— writer Donald Hall on NPR’s Fresh Air (via forwhenifeellikesharing)

As long as I can do my work and continue to enjoy myself working on words … I feel fulfilled. My body causes me trouble when I cross the room, but when I am sitting down writing, I am in my heaven — my old heaven. I began writing when I was 12, I don’t think very well. But I’ve been doing it my whole life. It’s been the center of my life with loves and children, but writing is something I have that not everyone has that I adore.

— On today’s Fresh Air, poet Donald Hall reflects on aging, writing and his life.

From the archives: Saul Bellow

Doing NANOWRIMO? Here’s some inspiration from:

Stephen King Philip Roth Maurice Sendak Allison Pearson Donald Ray Pollack Stewart O’Nan Tina Fey and hundreds more 

Novelists think a lot about God … [because] we create whole worlds and we people them and then we tell the people what to do: We make them fall in love or fall out of windows. So there is that curiosity about God that I think all novelists have.

— On today’s Fresh Air, writer Scott Spencer talks about religion, chaos, prison writing, violence and defending others.

Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first film critic to receive the award.

nprfunfacts:

two thumbs up.

The numbers on a dollar bill are written in Helvetica font.

nprfunfacts:

The official font of President Obama’s presidential campaign was Gotham.

Everything written on this blog is sung in Comic Sans.